Partnering to make a homeplace for Black families: Black women's systemic leadership in an era of retrenchment

This paper examines how a research-community-practice partnership (RCPP) led primarily by Black women district and community leaders navigated systemic challenges to racial equity work and created conditions for co-designing with Black families and communities. Drawing on data analyses from planning meetings with district leaders, families, community partners, and university researchers, we discuss three findings pertaining to our RCPP’s efforts to foster conditions for co-designing justice-centered, pro-Black early literacy learning with Black families and educators: 1) Black women leaders’ ability to “read” the historically-rooted dynamic inequities of the system; 2) Black women’s leadership and placemaking in the RCPP to co-create homeplace; and 3) community partners’ leadership in evolving our partnership practices to better honor family and community leadership. Implications illuminate the importance of supporting and honoring Black feminist leadership approaches to sustain racial equity work as well as insights about designing for systemic sustainability amidst the constant shifts of leadership, resources, and organizational structures in an urban school district in the U.S. West. Efforts to evolve the RCPP’s practices resulted in a set of design principles that represent an emergent, collective strategy to create conditions for solidarity-driven co-design amidst retrenchment from equity work.